31 October 2011 4:54 PM

I’ll get on to Judas Iscariot in a moment. I am asked how I define poverty. I would define physical poverty as severe want – not enough food to eat, no access to clean water, absence of proper shelter either from great heat or from cold, inadequate clothing, untreated sickness and no possibility of medical help, conditions so squalid that cleanliness is impossible, severe overcrowding. These are the features of poverty that I have seen in various forms on my many travels into remote parts of the world.

I had an interesting discussion about this on Nicky Campbell’s Radio Five Live programme a few weeks ago, and was encouraged by a contributor from Africa who agreed with me that poverty of this kind does not really exist in this country. But he added that hardship undoubtedly does exist. Of course much of that hardship stems from not having things that others do have, and from a feeling of injustice and rejection. But this is not poverty, which in my view is an absolute condition of severe material want, not a comparative condition of being worse off than your neighbour. I would add, as I often do, that I suspect that there may be something very close to absolute poverty among the lonely old people of this country, trying to make ends meet on no more than their pensions, regarding any further appeal to the welfare state as a shameful (and therefore unthinkable) form of charity which they are too proud to accept.

Many of these live very pinched and deprived lives, though even they are materially rich beside the rural dwellers of North Korea or millions of the less fortunate in Africa and parts of India. But the measure of poverty as an arbitrary proportion of average income is just a device by which socialists justify their unending raid on the possessions of the wealthy and productive, to finance the unproductive and penniless state in its vote-buying projects. Some of these projects may incidentally do good. But their aim is not to do good, but to make their authors feel good about themselves, while increasing their power. It also incidentally shrinks the power of the productive middle-class to be charitable in their own right, as they have handed over a large part of their charitable duty to the state.

That is why I am so fond of Christ’s rebuke to Judas, and the account as a whole. The passage is as follows: The Gospel according to John, 12th Chapter, beginning at verse iv; Mary (not Mary Magdalene, but Mary, sister of Lazarus), has just taken a pound – or 454 grams in the Rocky Horror Bible - of very costly Spikenard ointment and wiped Jesus’s feet with her hair, ‘and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment’. ‘Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, which should betray him : ‘Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?’ This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein. Then said Jesus :’Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always’.

As so often, there’s a lot packed into this, notably the realistic recognition that there will always be poor people in the world , and those who wish to help them will always have the opportunity to do so. But it is the biting observation that Judas, like so many since, is pretending a concern for the poor to cover up other, less noble motives, that really goes home with a satisfying thud. There is no new thing under the sun. I’m accused by some of saying that Christianity has no part to play in politics. I’ve no doubt, as it happens, that it does have a part. But that it is an individual part, in that the man or woman who embraces Christian principle may be involved in politics, in any party which is not actually wicked, and use his or her individual influence to good and Christian ends. But I do not think there is such a thing as a ‘Christian policy’ or a Christian party’, or that any grouping should arrogate Christianity to itself as its own possession. This is because Christianity is not about earthly power, but about love. And if you think about it, power is the opposite of love – and the less love there is, the more power you will generally find.

That’s enough religion for this posting (though I plan another contribution on a recent visit to Lincoln Cathedral which may be of interest to the atheist fancy). On other comments, Mr McDonald (or ‘McDonald’ as he perhaps prefers to be addressed) is wrong in particular in saying that the MPs’ expenses story was offered first to our sister paper ‘The Daily Mail’ (it wasn’t, though I should point out here yet again that I do not write for the ‘Daily Mail’, but for the ‘Mail on Sunday’ , a separate paper with its own editor and staff) and wrong in general, that the anti-EU rebels were specially spendthrift on the expenses gravy train ( I believe one of them had the lowest claims of any MP, whereas Mr Cameron himself, as I so often point out, was among the highest claimers – quite legally –for his nice country house, despite being personally rich. There’s a book to be written on the selective nature of the coverage of MPs’ expenses, and the selective nature of the way in which some were chosen for the public pillory and others exempted). Many of the rebels are, I believe, newly elected since the rules were changed). So the comment is both incorrect and irrelevant.

If people come here to plug the BNP, they must learn that they will earn themselves my utter contempt. I had thought we had got rid of them, but perhaps now the BNP – which is now tiny and very short of money - has emerged from its latest furious inner faction fight, it now has time to start spreading slime again. This revolting grouplet has been thoroughly dealt with here, and the index is full of clear explanations as to why no civilised person should dirty himself by association with such a spectacularly disreputable organisation. Reminder: It was founded by a Judophobe Hitler-worshipper, so pitifully obsessed with Jews that he once launched an investigation into Nicholas Griffin’s ancestry because he thought his (Griffin’s) father had rather a large nose, and still peopled with Holocaust-deniers and similar. The BNP’s noisy flag-wagging patriotism is wholly opportunist. So is its, er, critique of Islam. Mr Griffin, it might be recalled, once travelled to Tripoli to seek aid from the late Colonel Gadaffi. Not long afterwards he was consorting with the Ku Klux Klan. Is there nobody Mr Griffin can’t bring himself to meet? There is nothing to hope for from this squalid and pathetic faction, whose existence does grave damage to every cause it claims to espouse.

As for UKIP, I only attack it when I am foolishly urged to support it. I have explained why( again see the index) and only those who want me to attack it should sing its praises here or pointlessly seek my endorsement of it, which is never going to come. I cannot think of a more certain way of ensuring that opposition to EU membership returned to the braying margins of political, life, for the rebel Tories to have anything to do with this hopeless Dad’s Army, a group of people so politically naïve that they thought they could make use of Robert Kilroy-Silk. He tied them up, hand and foot, with their own cravats. The Gang of Four came closer to succeeding than most people realise. Their failure was not predetermined, though Margaret Thatcher bears some responsibility for it, as I shall one day be free to reveal. Oh, and to Howard Medwell ‘Why *not* “Pestilent”?’ It’s a good 18th-century pejorative term, much in need of revival.

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29 October 2011 10:04 PM

Why are the 80 Euro-rebels still in the Useless Tory Party? They know that they were right, and David Cameron (pictured) was wrong. They also know that if they stay under his command he will carry on treating them like insects.

Some will be threatened. Some will find their seats have vanished thanks to Mr Cameron’s creepy reform plan. As long as they submit to him, they have no future. They will achieve nothing worth having for themselves, or for those who voted for them.

The things they believe in will still be scorned by the cold, ruthless liberal clique that runs the Tory Party.

Britain will stay trapped in the burning building that is the European Union, gaining nothing and losing independence, liberty and prosperity.

But look at what happens to the mere 57 Liberal Democrat MPs who voted for the EU on Monday. They are much loved by Mr Cameron and his circle. They need only to whisper a desire and it is granted – the latest being the ghastly plan to make us all live on Berlin Time.

Unlike the principled Tory rebels, these Liberal Democrat MPs stand for very little. They are mostly in Parliament because of what they are not, and what they don’t think or don’t say, rather than because of who they are or what they believe in.

If 57 soppy anti-British, pro-crime, anti-education, pro-immigration, anti-family nonentities can push David Cameron around with the constant unspoken threat of walking out of the Coalition, think what 80 pro-British, anti-crime, anti-immigration, pro-education MPs could do to him by actually walking out of it.

He would then have to face a proper opposition – after all, David Davis disagrees with Mr Cameron much more than Ed Miliband does, and about far more subjects.

But to have any impact, the 80 must quit the Tory Party, which last week finally and irrevocably turned its back on its voters. As long as they stay inside it they are powerless serfs. Worse, they are a human shield protecting Mr Cameron from the emergence of a proper patriotic movement.

Following the example of the ‘Gang of Four’, who nearly 30 years ago came within an inch of destroying and replacing the Labour Party, they should declare independence.

From then on, if Mr Cameron wants their support, he will have to ask for it nicely, rather than by threatening, insulting and bullying them. And such a grouping would at last provide a real alternative to the three near-identical BBC-approved parties that nowadays compete for our votes.

My guess is that such a breakaway would do well at any by-election in an existing Tory seat, and by 2015 would be at least halfway to replacing the sordid and treacherous official Unconservative Party. Then we might have something to hope for.

What is there to lose? Its potential leaders know who they are, and how to act. Now is the time to do so.

You wouldn't find Jesus in a St Paul's tent

I back the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, (pictured) against the pestilent rabble that has cluttered up the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral.

St Paul’s may be a bit commercial, but I don’t see how else it can pay for the upkeep of one of the ten greatest buildings in Europe, recently superbly restored. The Church of England gets no tax money.

And the Cathedral’s continued existence amid the soaring towers of mammon is an important reminder of the faith and beliefs that actually sustain our wealth and freedom.

As for the protesters, why are we all supposed to be so nice to them? They seem to think that by brainlessly saying they are against ‘capitalism’, they automatically become good.

‘What would Jesus do?’ they ask, with a whining implication that He would be one of them. Tripe. He despised politics, and rebuked Judas Iscariot (the first socialist) for going on and on about the poor to make himself look good. As you’ll recall, he wasn’t as good as he looked.

Christianity is not about having the right opinions and telling everyone. It is about who you really are, and what you really do, in secret, when nobody is looking.

Is smashing gravestones funny, Fiona?

The BBC forget far too often that they are paid for by you and me. That is why I was so angry last week when they refused to show me a recording of a recent TV news bulletin which had attracted many complaints.

Newsreader Fiona Bruce (pictured) was the focus of the viewers’ discontent.

They felt she had been far too light-hearted in her presentation of a rather dark item, in which a callous moron was shown driving a stolen JCB digger through a cemetery, smashing and scattering gravestones.

Some may be unmoved by this, or even think it amusing. But there is a large class of people who, for one reason or another, find the desecration of graves obscenely shocking and grim. I am one of them.

But at the end of the item, Ms Bruce spoke only to the London trendies, and forgot about everyone else. She exclaimed ‘Unbelievable!’ – as if it was all a bit of fun – while lifting her hands in the air and grinning with apparent amusement. Then, half-laughing, she handed over to the weatherman.

The BBC knew the matter was sensitive because of the complaints they had received. Yet a spokesman – while flatly refusing to allow me to see the BBC’s own recording of the programme – had the nerve to insist Ms Bruce’s response was ‘of pure astonishment at the extraordinary scenes that had resulted from the driver’s trail of destruction’. Ms Bruce herself, in my view rather more wisely, declined to comment at all.

For I have now seen a recording of the programme, despite the BBC’s efforts to keep it from me, and after watching it several times I think the complainers are right, and the BBC version is severely misleading.

This shows yet again that BBC people move in a world quite unlike the one where most people dwell. And that the Corporation, paid for by a tax levied under the threat of fines and prison, still arrogantly refuses to accept that it owes its paymasters any courtesy, or is obliged to be open when it has blundered.

The REAL tragedy behind the summer 'riots'

Much fuss last week when the Ministry of Injustice released figures about the backgrounds of those arrested after the mass thieving and destruction (the so-called riots) of last summer.

The liberal Left, which fools itself that crime is caused by non-existent ‘poverty’, seized on suggestions that many of the alleged offenders came from ‘deprived’ backgrounds (which in Left-speak appears to means ‘unable to afford the latest widescreen TV’).

Well, they can believe that if they want to. But I am sure that if anyone had checked, it would have turned out that more than 90 per cent of these people came from homes where there was no father reliably present. (NB: it’s the absence of the father I am emphasising, not the presence of a single mother.)

This is the single biggest predictor of bad outcomes in any child’s life, but it is also one our welfare system vigorously encourages. I expect that is why the Government didn’t try to find out the facts.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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27 October 2011 1:23 PM

I am publishing this as a free-standing post because I feel it must be resolved properly, and want to be certain that the person involved is aware of the risks he runs.

Some days ago, in a response to my column of last Sunday (‘This is no SuperCam’), a Mr ‘Harold Stone’ posted a comment. I should say here that some of his comment was edited for legal reasons but - according to the rules which operate here - his direct personal criticisms of me were not edited. All may say what you like about me, provided it is true, or just hostile and abusive. Untruths, however, are not acceptable. The editing process also led to a delay in his words being published. But they were published. This is what he said: He first quoted what I had said :‘It occurs to me - though of course it isn’t true - that if MI5 wanted to discredit any honest movement against mass immigration, the cleverest thing it could do would be to set up something called, say, the ‘British Patriotic Party’, and staff it with Jew-haters, racialists and Holocaust deniers.’

He then wrote: ‘And it occurs to me – since of course it is perfectly true – that an MI5 anxious to ensure we continue to believe we live in a society which protects free speech would almost certainly staff newspapers with faux-conservative “assets” to lead people up blind alleys about the effectiveness of the party system, or oppose repatriation on “moral grounds” because the other deception they peddle, about the irrelevance of racial differences, allows them to insist that an Englishman can come from Tunbridge or Timbuktu. You’d scarcely be the first newspaper journalist to be run by the security services (think Ian Fleming and a score of others less well-known). Speaking as a racialist myself, that is to say one genuinely led by the facts, by observation, by reason and the lessons of history rather than pretending to be, I’d say it’s how all security services operate to discredit truth-tellers. Trotsky ordered the cadres to ignore rational argument and to make truth-telling distasteful to people. Equalitarian dogma (disguised as Christianity?) could thereby pass itself off as ‘authentic’ conservatism which, because of its ideologically driven repudiation of biology, would fail to conserve a damned thing. Again I must ask if you know what a nation actually is Mr Hitchens, you who boast about your grasp of history, and wonder what on earth gives you the right to sneer at Cameron when you display not a shred of integrity yourself on this subject, since it’s plain you know the truth deep down?’

Mr Stone is welcome to his opinions, much as I dislike them. But he appears to suggest that I am an employee or servant of the Security Service, engaging in systematic dishonesty on their behalf. He uses these pretty direct words: ‘You’d scarcely be the first newspaper journalist to be run by the security services’ and ‘it occurs to me – since of course it is perfectly true – that an MI5 anxious to ensure we continue to believe we live in a society which protects free speech would almost certainly staff newspapers with faux-conservative “assets” to lead people up blind alleys’.

I must ask him either to substantiate this allegation with facts, or to withdraw it and offer an unreserved apology. If he does neither then, under the usual rules, he will no longer be welcome here. I think a week should be enough. In case he has not so far seen this warning (first posted yesterday on the relevant thread) I will date that week from the publication of this posting. I will listen to any reasonable request for more time but given his confident tone, I imagine he has the evidence at his fingertips and should rapidly be able to back up his claims. Or perhaps not.

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This is a light-hearted diversion for the God-hating adherents to this site (to whom I occasionally fling hunks of bleeding flesh, so that I can watch them come flapping from afar to feast on it).

Maybe it will also be a rest from the tedium of responding (yet again) to the various lame and exploded ‘arguments’ of the drug lobby, for making their selfish habit even more legal than it already is. If just one of them ever paid any attention, or engaged seriously, it would make it seem worthwhile. But they never do. It’s all mechanical, destructive rhetoric they’ve got off the telly, or learned in PSHE classes.

Now, serious engagement was exactly what we got in the uplifting surroundings of Sir Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre (named after Archbishop Gilbert Sheldon, since you ask, and one of the great buildings of Europe, superb inside and outside but perhaps most astonishing of all up in the mighty roof-beams that make it possible) in Oxford on Tuesday night. The Sheldonian is one of a group of buildings which in largely embody English history, as well as expressing the Royal grandeur of the restored Stuarts. They look pretty startling now, but set amid the small and muddy town that was Oxford at the end of the 17th century, they must have seemed almost impossibly majestic.

Next to it is Bodley’s Great Library, and beyond that Radcliffe Square dominated by The College of All Souls, a monument to the dead of the Hundred Years’ War, and the soaring church of St Mary the Virgin, scene of Thomas Cranmer’s great trial and renunciation of the Pope. Next to the Sheldonian is the Clarendon Building, once the headquarters of the University Press, and built thanks to the profits of the ‘History of the Great Rebellion’, the first great account of the English Civil War, written by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Sheldon, a courageous Anglican who had to be ejected bodily from All Souls, by the Cromwellians, was a close ally of Clarendon, so it is fitting that buildings named after both of them stand next to each other. Three hundred yards away is the spot where Cranmer, (and before him Latimer and Ridley) were burned to death for their Protestant beliefs. But I digress. The American philosopher William Lane Craig had offered to debate Richard Dawkins’s book ‘The God Delusion’ with its author, in his home town (and mine) . Dawkins is around, because he has his own event in another Oxford location on Friday. But despite being in the midst of promoting a new book, Dawkins refused to come. He came up with a series of silly excuses, none of which holds water. And an empty chair was provided for him at the Sheldonian on Tuesday evening, in case he changed his mind and – yes – to mock him for his absence. Details of this controversy are all over the web, and I was impressed by the behaviour of another Oxford atheist, Daniel Came, who said Dawkins should have turned up, and had the guts to be there himself . I might say that I thought his contribution was serious, thoughtful and properly modest about the limits of what we can know. The bumptiousness and raillery of Dawkins and some other anti-God preachers was entirely absent from his discourse, and it was all the better for it.

I have to confess here that I don’t find Craig’s debating style or manner very attractive. It is too smooth and American for me – and his best moment (again, for me) came when he dropped his salesman’s manner and said, in effect, that he was sorry if he seemed too certain, and that his fundamental claims were modest ones – that the Theist position was scientifically tenable.

The most moving – and most enjoyable – contribution of the evening came from the marvellous Dr Stephen Priest, simultaneously diffident and extremely powerful. I won’t try to summarise it because I’m sure I’d fail. I hope it will eventually make it on to the web. It reminded me of why I had once wanted to study philosophy, a desire which faded rapidly when I was exposed to English Linguistic Philosophy and various other strands of that discipline which made me wonder if I had wandered into a convention of crossword-compilers, when what I wanted was to seek the origins of the universe.

Many of you will know that in his failure to face William Lane Craig, Professor Dawkins was not alone. Several other members of Britain’s Atheist Premier League found themselves unable or unwilling (or both) to take him on.

The important thing about this is that what Craig does is simple. He uses philosophical logic, and a considerable knowledge of physics, to expose the shallowness of Dawkins’s arguments. I would imagine that an equally serious Atheist philosopher would be able to give him a run for his money, but Dawkins isn’t that. He would have been embarrassingly out of his depth.

For what Craig achieves is this. He simply retakes an important piece of ground that Christianity lost through laziness and cowardice, rather than because it lacked the weapons to defend it.

He doesn’t (in my view) achieve total victory over the unbelievers. He simply says : ‘In this logic, which you cannot deny, and in this science, which you cannot deny either, it is clear that there is plenty of room for the possibility that God exists and made the universe’. No scientifically literate person, who is informed and can argue logically, can in truth say that he is wrong.

The trouble is that so many ‘official’ Christians have more or less conceded this ground, not being very firm believers themselves, and lacking Craig’s training in logic and science.

He is the antidote to the lazy belief that in some way ‘science’ is incompatible with ‘religion’, and to the idea that all believers are unlettered morons who think the earth is 5,000 years old and that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark.

This is, I’m afraid, all too often the tone of the anti-God people who come here to post. It’s settled, you’re stupid, why not give up?

It’s not settled. We’re not stupid. We won’t give up.

(NB: A note to Mr ‘Crosland’. I won’t respond to any queries he posts here - and I have a small bet with myself as to what form they will take this time - until he replies to my ‘childishly simple’ private letter to him, which he has had since August).

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26 October 2011 11:28 AM

Sometimes one sees the vast gulf of understanding which lies between oneself and other people brought up in an entirely different world.

‘Andrew’ writes (on an earlier thread) first quoting me:

‘"Anyone who accepts the death of innocents as a possible if unintended consequence of any policy which he supports - any policy - cannot logically advance the 'innocents might die ' argument as a case against any other policy. It is inconsistent." -Peter Hitchens 4 October 2011 ‘

My reply: So far, so good. I said that.

He continues 'The first policy that you support is capital punishment. You acknowledge that the death of innocents would be an unintended consequence of this policy - as you still support the policy you must therefore accept the death of innocents as an unintended consequence.’

My reply, so far, so good, though I would say it *might* be an unintended consequence of a death penalty, not that it would be, as it happens. I also said (and will repeat later) that all conceivable steps should be taken to avoid such innocent deaths. Recognising their inevitability is not the same as being indifferent to them. It is certainly not an argument for not taking steps that could prevent innocent deaths. The steps that I advocate (to ensure that innocents are not executed) are comparable in aim and effect to the enforcement of the drug laws that I advocate.

There is a multiple misrepresentation of my *purpose* in advancing this argument. I am not saying that we shouldn’t care about innocent deaths, and only a person consumed with furious hostility towards me could imagine that was what I was saying.

I am saying that those who advance the danger of innocent deaths as a sole argument against capital punishment (and there are many Tory and other politicians who do so, while claiming to accept arguments about deterrence) are not restrained from other policies by similar or greater dangers of innocent deaths. Therefore this cannot be their real objection. Either they have another objection, which they conceal because they are ashamed of it or know it to be feeble. Or they have not thought about it. Or they are avoiding the responsibility which falls on any government, to protect the people from harm.

He continues:’The other policy that you support is keeping illegal drugs illegal, or in other words, not introducing a third poison when we already have two. You advance the "innocents might die" argument as a case for this policy.'

Do I? Where did I advance that argument, precisely? One small part of my argument (in this instance, though I have been conducting it here and elsewhere for many years on many differnet fronts ) is, I rather thought , that people who took such drugs in the belief that they are ‘soft’ or ‘safe’ might well fall victim to irreversible mental illness, thus ruining their own lives and the lives of those who loved them and/or depended upon them in any way. There are, on occasion, deaths from drug abuse, but these -though avoidable and tragic - are exceptional and not in themselves the burden of my case. Nor, as it happens, is the question of mental illness. This is just the part of my case which my pro-drug opponents cannot deny or avoid.

They are entirely relaxed about this country’s adoption of a third-world pleasure-based morality – of which legalised drugs are a major feature - which will destroy its culture, its society, its freedom and its economy if unchecked. They either think this is a good thing, don’t believe it is a problem or don’t care. I am not concealing this argument. I make it all the time to anyone who will listen. I’m just not wasting it this week on morally corrupt cultural revolutionaries (and self-interested drug lobbyists) whose reaction will be ‘So what? I want to join the Third World, provided I can stay rich and comfortable’. For them, I point out that their selfish pleasure is bought at a high price –the risk to the sanity and happiness of others. I hope that by doing so I will at least make them ashamed of their greedy, self- centred contempt for their fellow humans.

Whereas if there were properly enforced laws against possession, these people, and many others besides, would in many cases not be so stupid as to ingest a drug which is in truth hugely and unpredictably dangerous. This is a simple policy matter - where a policy reduces damage to innocents. It is not in any way a policy which accepts an increase in innocent deaths as the price of its success, as it happens. Cannabis rarely if ever kills those who use it. A law properly punishing possession of cananbis does not risk innocentt deaths. Worrying about mental harm experienced by guilty deliberate criminals - for cannabis users are by definition criminals under law – is rather different from worrying about deaths among the innocent. It is also not my sole argument

He adds:’ In the case of cannabis specifically, whilst innocents would not die, they might suffer from serious mental illness, which is a consequence that you have previously stated to be just as serious. You accept that innocents might die in policy 1, which you support. You then use the "innocents might die (or come to serious harm)" argument to support policy 2. That is, as you say in your own words above, inconsistent.’

No it isn’t. I am sorry, this silly-clever stuff is too ingenious for its own good, because it is founded on mischief rather than serious reason, and so misses the fundamental point of what I am saying. That is why I could not when it was first presented, and cannot now, see how anyone could honestly believe it to be a serious point.

I am only dealing with it here because the drug lobbyists are apparently so desperate that they have, pathetically, persuaded themselves that it is a serious point. To say that the ‘innocents might die’ argument is generally inconsistent, and therefore useless *as a sole argument against capital punishment* and as a sole argument *advanced by people who accept innocent deaths as the price of other policies they desire*, is *not* to say that it is never justifiable to advance the reduction of pain and death as a justification for any policy.

Nor is it to say that the law should be indifferent to the deaths of innocents. Obviously diligent steps should be taken to ensure that innocent persons are not executed, as I have said time without number. Would it then be ‘inconsistent’ for me to say that diligent steps should be taken to stop people going mad from smoking cannabis. ?

To say that the argument ‘innocents might die’ does not work as a sole argument against the death penalty is *not* to say that we should not be concerned over reducing the deaths of innocents – indeed, the death penalty itself, in my view, reduces the deaths of innocents, and that is one of its many purposes.

Finally, my argument concerns the faults in objections to the adoption of a law which might have the consequence of innocents dying.

It does not concern objections to the non-enforcement of a law, whose non-enforcement undoubtedly leads to harm to innocents, if not deaths.

So tell me again, where my alleged 'inconsistency' is.

I note that this absurd diversion has taken the pressure off the drug-legalisers, who until it was introduced were struggling to explain why the existence of two legal poisons could justify the legalisation of a third. I suspect that is the point of it. They are beaten yet again, so rather than admit it, they have changed the subject.

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25 October 2011 3:26 PM

Regular readers here will know that I often scornfully refer to Tory MPs as ‘Black Labradors’, those hopelessly loyal dogs who endure all things from their masters and then, tails thumping and eyes shining with love and joy, are crammed into the station wagon for their final journey to the vet.

Well, I suppose you could say that on Tuesday night we saw the revolt of the Black Labradors.

But it was all the wrong way round. There they were, nearly 80 Tory MPs, all representing the views of their constituents as they are supposed to do, and they let themselves be defined as ‘rebels’.

It was they who were threatened with punishment and the ruin of their careers (should MPs have ‘careers’? I do not think so. The whole idea is all wrong ) .

The man doing the threatening was an individual elected to the leadership of his party on false pretences, on subtly spread untruths about his true feelings which enabled so many Tories, members, MPs and voters, to harbour ludicrous delusions about his true beliefs.

And he had then become Prime Minister thanks to a similar subtle hint, never made explicit, but spread through the media by willing toadies, that he was ‘sound’ on the issues that really concern conservative British people.

By contrast, the 79 ‘rebels’ were merely doing what they had said they would do and what they were elected to do, and, in a way, what they are paid to do.

It is Mr Cameron whose ‘career’ should be threatened. It is Mr Cameron who should be facing ‘discipline’ for behaviour which, even according to his loose Public School code, is fundamentally shameful – namely pledging to be one sort of Prime Minister to gain office, and then being another sort when he got there.

Now, I’m not very sympathetic to those who were fooled by this. It was plain to me that Mr Cameron was always what he now is, and I used a lot of effort, patience and time in explaining this to wilfully deaf Tories before 2010.

(By the way, I much enjoyed myself on Tuesday evening at a meeting of the Bruges Group in London, where I was able to say repeatedly that I had told them so, in October 2009, and they had then welcomed me with a response so chilly it made me believe in man-made global cooling. Last night was different. My calls for the death of the Tory Party were met with warm applause. Meanwhile, the rather absurd David Campbell-Bannerman, who has incomprehensibly returned to the Tories from UKIP, while still claiming to be pro-independence, at the precise moment when the Tory Party has rededicated itself at the altar of Brussels, must have found the whole occasion a sore trial. Too bad.)

And now I say to these ‘rebels’, that their ‘revolt’ on Tuesday night will be worthless if they do not now move rapidly towards leaving the party which dares to punish them for following their principles and representing those who sent them to Westminster. If this breach is not the occasion for such a split, then they are indeed Black Labradors. A brief spell of whimpering, even an uncharacteristic nip at their master’s silk-socked ankles, does not fundamentally alter a relationship in which the good are servile, and the bad are triumphant.

Mourning in Mexico

Mr Scott, who still hasn’t remotely answered my question about how the existence of two legal poisons, both disastrous, justifies the introduction of a third, tries to change the subject by going on about Mexico.

Mexico, like all other countries where the growing of illegal drugs has become a lucrative industry, is the innocent victim of the immorality of pleasure-seeking Westerners. It is their willingness to pay high prices for their brain-frying substances that has given the drug-gangs the power they possess.

The root of the evil, lies in the decadence of these rich and selfish criminals. To bring it to an end, therefore, we must discourage drug-taking by punishing it.

Oh, and the constant raising of the Portuguese ‘experiment’ is of little use here. Many of the claims made are at least disputed, and the word ‘treatment’ is a flat falsehood. To call it a euphemism is too polite.

It is nothing of the kind, as drug-taking is not an illness but a wilful crime, and ‘treatment’ does not stop drug use, but instead subsidises and encourages the habit. It is merely a polite way of saying that the state takes over the role of drug-dealer and thief, robbing the taxpayer to provide free pleasure to parasites, who for the most part make themselves incapable of productive work through their voluntary, pleasure-seeking habit. I wonder how long Portugal will be able to afford such a crazy response.

That way lies the end of civilisation. No proper country can afford to behave in such a way for long, as it will destroy its economy and poison its moral system. Nor is it moral to levy tax for such a destructive purpose. That road leads to an impoverished and exploited Chinese-dominated (and probably Chinese-ruled) Europe. Or perhaps to an Islamic Europe, as the Chinese may not much want to take responsibility for the mess we are making.

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24 October 2011 3:49 PM

Just a second, but I have to point out that the current ‘revolt’ by Tory ‘Eurosceptics’ has no hope of achieving anything. Well, it has achieved one thing, to remind those who had forgotten, and tell those too dim to have realised it so far, that David Cameron is in fact a keen supporter of the EU project.

I do try to restrain my use of sarcastic inverted commas, deploying them mainly for such things as knighthoods granted to rock stars. People like me, brought up on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Sir Nigel’ and ‘The White Company’, think chivalry is not attained by making lots of money from cheap music. So we find most modern knighthoods ridiculous. I’ve never really understood why people who despise tradition and the older virtues would want such archaic handles to their names.

But this ‘revolt’ is no such thing. It will not shake the power elite of the Conservative Party, a near-mediaeval group of courtiers beyond the reach of any sort of accountability. As for the word ‘Eurosceptic’, it is largely meaningless, as well as being ugly and clumsy. The two things are connected. For it is a word that seeks to hide the truth, rather than state the truth.

The ‘Sceptics’ may offer many doubts and criticisms of the European Union. But they continue to belong to a party which has the EU in its DNA. And they must by now realise that nothing they do will change that party. Yet they remain inside it, making the occasional gesture of exasperation or defiance, as they are doing tonight.

Even if they succeeded in getting their referendum, and even if they succeeded in winning it – near impossible without at least one major party calling for a vote to withdraw - it would not bind the British government. The only real solution is for a general election to be won by a party committed to secession. And with the Tory party in the way, bed-blocking the position that ought to be occupied by such a party, that will never happen.

And here is why – the miserable fiasco of the Suez expedition, an explosion, 50 years too late, of British resentment towards the American takeover of our position as top nation.

After Suez had failed, largely but not wholly because the USA had wrecked it (it was a stupid plan anyway), the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told Guy Mollet, Prime Minister of France, ‘France and England will never be powers comparable to the United States and the Soviet Union. Nor Germany, either. There remains to them only one way of playing a decisive role in the world, that is to unite to make Europe. England is not ripe for it but the affair of Suez will help to prepare her spirits for it. We have no time to waste. *Europe will be your revenge*.’ This is recorded in the memoirs of the then French Foreign Minister, Christian Pineau. Adenauer and Mollet were meeting in Paris that day (Tuesday, 6th November 1956) to finalise the founding arrangements of the Common Market, which as we see here is, was and always will be an anti-American project, though the US State Department and the CIA have never, it seems, been able to work this out.

As for Britain not being ripe, I should hope we would never be ripe for such a thing. I doubt very much whether Konrad Adenauer had much understanding of Britain – few continental politicians do, Charles de Gaulle being a rare exception. The two men, for instance jointly attended Mass in Rheims Cathedral, their continental Roman Catholicism binding them together just as it excluded the Protestant British islanders from their world.

There were at that stage many British patriots so outraged by America’s behaviour that they too felt the need for revenge. And they began to the Common Market as the vehicle for this, perhaps not caring about the price and being themselves too disillusioned with their own country’s traditions to care much about preserving them.

It still amazes me how much reasonably well-informed people care about empty - and indeed often dangerously misleading - trinkets such as universal suffrage, and so little about jewels of great price such as Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, jury trial and the English Bill of Rights.

Ted Heath, perhaps the least pro-American British prime minister of modern times, was also the most pro-EU. And it also seems to me that he was the one least moved by the grandeur of our separateness, the unique liberties secured thanks to our Island position and all that followed from it. It is absurd to imagine that any of these people, or indeed anyone deeply involved in the British politics of the late fifties and early sixties, did not know what the Common Market really was. In fact it has always seemed to me to be the worst argument against this project, to say that we were told it was a free trade agreement and it turned out to be a plan to absorb us into a superstate, and we never knew.

Those who didn’t know, chose not to know. Although Ted Heath and the pro-Brussels faction did not wish it to be discussed, the opponents of the plan noisily proclaimed that it was what it was.

They were ‘maverick and marginal’ because we – people and politicians and media figures alike – proclaimed that they were marginal and stopped our ears to the blatant truth. Among those who did so until very late was Margaret thatcher herself who – never let this be forgotten- campaigned for a ‘yes’ vote in 1975 in a sweater patterned with the flags of the Common Market nations.

Opposing Maastricht, or the Single Market, or the Social Chapter, or every other accretion of Brussels power up to and including the Euro and the Lisbon Treaty, is just so much shouting in the street if it is not allied to a recognition that each of these things is in fact a necessary and logical part of the European project. And also let us strip ourselves of the illusion that the EU could, had we joined it earlier been designed to suit us better. Its needs and aims conflict with ours because it is continental, and we are not. That is why we have ever been able to form any lasting alliance against the Franco-German heart of the project, with any other member of it.

You can’t oppose them without opposing the project as a whole. You can’t do that from within a party which is completely wedded to that project, and which contains no mechanism through which you can influence its policy.

The logic of this seems to me to be quite clear, and quite inevitable.

Now, I am sorry that we ceded our global supremacy to the USA. How could any child of a naval officer, born and brought up in a succession of naval harbours, as they emptied of warships and sank into decrepitude or became museums, not feel that way? But I do not see why Britain, or England if it comes to it, has to choose between being a superpower or a province. Nor do I see why we must choose between the USA and the EU.

It seems to me that there is a large space between the two conditions, and between those two powers, in which a powerful, wealthy, mature and civilised nation might sit quite happily, if it wished to do so.

Though I can truly say I voted ‘No’ in 1975, I must admit I did so because, as a junior reporter on the Swindon Evening Advertiser, I uncovered a nasty piece of dishonesty by the pro-Market campaign, and had my story suppressed on polling day by a pro-Market executive -. I took my revenge by going out and voting ‘No’, though I had until then fallen for the very seductive idealism promoted by the pro-EU campaigners, and been unimpressed by the cut-rate Churchillian rhetoric of (for example) Peter Shore.

I don’t suppose I thought about it again for nearly 30 years, being diverted by what seemed to me to be the more urgent matter of the Cold War. But in recent years, especially since the end of that Cold War, it has forced itself on my attention, and I have moved from indifference to concern to alarm to a certainty that, if we wish to survive as an independent state, we must secede. Any fool can be ‘sceptical’ about an institution or a policy. He can be sceptical about it while in fact supporting it in practice. He may do this either because he doesn’t really care, but has been put on the spot by constituents, or because he cares a bit, but not enough to risk his political career.

These are both perfectly reasonable human positions with which we can all sympathise, but they are not politics.

If we are not prepared to fight this properly, and to wreck the Tory Party to save the country – plainly more essential than ever – then we might as well go home, and accept that our country will henceforth be ruled from abroad. Which is it to be?

22 October 2011 10:01 PM

Two Tory MPs are so scared of David Cameron’s pro-EU thought police that they have hidden their identities when giving radio interviews on the subject.

One said that wanting to leave the EU was ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. The other attacked Mr Cameron’s broken pledge for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Both knew that the Tory whips would destroy them if their names became known.

So their words were spoken by actors, as if they were dissidents in some foreign dictatorship.

This extraordinary behaviour, broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s ultra-respectable Analysis programme, tells you all you need to know about the Conservative Party’s real position on Brussels, and plenty of other things.

For of course, this isn’t just about boring old Brussels. The EU is symbolic of all the other great issues that divide Mr Cameron from Tory voters – mass immigration, crime, disorder, education, marriage and morals.

I have known since I first spotted him trying to weaken the anti-drug laws that Mr Cameron was not a conservative. I have spoken to former colleagues who have concluded that he believes in nothing at all, but I think it is much worse than that. I think he is an active, militant elite liberal, who despises our country and its people, just as much as any Islington Marxist does.

What I could never understand was how so many men and women with the usual complement of eyes, ears and brains (and nostrils) managed to fool themselves so completely about him.

How many times did I read weighty commentators (weighty because of the huge number of lunches they had eaten with their political insider chums) proclaiming that Mr Cameron was a ‘sound Eurosceptic’? Or that he had ‘deep conservative instincts’? I seem to remember one such even praising his cricket.

Well, it was bunkum and balderdash, wasn’t it? I wouldn’t know about his cricketing skills, but his performance on the EU issue has been dishonest and treacherous from the start.

I still remember the look of rabbit-like fear on his smooth face on the day he broke his pledge of a Lisbon referendum. He was too cowardly to take a question from me, while that pathetic burst balloon, William Hague, sat silent in the front row of the press conference, endorsing his chief’s poltroonery.

But still the Tory loyalists wouldn’t see it, fooling themselves with a babyish dream that Mr Cameron had a secret plan, that once in office he would tear off his outer garments and reveal himself as SuperCam, a real patriot and conservative.

Well, now he has torn off his outer garments, ordered his cringing followers to vote against an EU referendum and revealed that he is in fact the reincarnation of Ted Heath, the man who betrayed Britain to Brussels and got his way by bullying and shameless dishonesty.

Nobody is making him do this. It is his own true self speaking. I told you so. I was right. And I am now enjoying myself telling you again.

But when will you do anything about it?

New Libya, same bloody way of doing business

Colonel Gaddafi was cruelly murdered by a mob. This disgusting episode, which no decent person can approve of, is typical of the sordid revolution which our Government has decided to endorse and aid.

Nearly as bad, most of our media reported the barbaric spectacle in gleeful tones. God preserve them from ever being at the mercy of a lynch mob themselves is all I can say.

Shame, also, on those who referred to this squalid crime as an ‘execution’. Why is this word these days applied to its opposite? An execution follows lawful due process. It is not another word for a gang slaying or a lynching, such as happened to Muammar Gaddafi.

Any new state that begins with such an event will be poisoned and polluted by it ever afterwards, just as the communist world was blighted by the Bolshevik massacre of the Russian imperial family in 1918.

The nebulous new Libyan regime is already torturing its prisoners, who in many cases have been seized without formal legal procedure. From now on, all those who supported this ill-advised intervention will share responsibility for every lynching, whipping, unjust detention and miserable dungeon in the New Libya they helped to make.

Doesn’t anyone know any history? The day that Colonel Gaddafi overthrew King Idris in 1969, Tripoli was full of rejoicing crowds, no doubt similar to those who celebrate today.

* * *

I am pleased to say that a planned march against immigration in Boston, Lincolnshire, has been called off. The organisers rightly feared that it would be taken over by sinister and creepy factions.

It occurs to me - though of course it isn’t true - that if MI5 wanted to discredit any honest movement against mass immigration, the cleverest thing it could do would be to set up something called, say, the ‘British Patriotic Party’, and staff it with Jew-haters, racialists and Holocaust deniers.

And then these people could latch on to every decent protest and wreck it.

By contrast, look at what is happening in Switzerland. There, a mainstream political party isn’t ashamed to oppose mass immigration on perfectly civilised and reasonable grounds.

The Swiss are on course for a referendum that will almost certainly vote to close their borders after a failed experiment with leaving them wide open.

Drugs wreck lives: A lesson Mr Dodgeon's finally learned

If you doubt the terrible dangers of illegal drugs, look at the miserable fate of Brian Dodgeon.

Mr Dodgeon, pictured right, calls himself ‘an old hippie’. He is an academic and former social worker. He is all too typical of the demoralised English middle class, a type of liberal bigot common in the media and among teachers and social workers.

In their tens of thousands, they fried their brains with dope in the Sixties and Seventies, so becoming even more stupid than they already were.

Now they form a noisy, powerful lobby against proper enforcement of the drug law today, lying that there is a ‘war on drugs’. Ha ha.

If only there were such a war, a schoolgirl might not have died after taking drugs Mr Dodgeon had left in his house during a teenage party. And he himself might not have been badly injured later while trying to end his life by jumping from a flyover.

Thanks to his selfishness and stupidity (the man is 61 years old), all these things happened.

No doubt the drugs lobby will try to put the blame elsewhere. They will be wrong to do so. As it happens, I am rather sorry for Mr Dodgeon, whose pitiable attempt at suicide shows that he has suffered true remorse.

But I am not sorry for the rest of his generation of idiots, who by their own bad example and irresponsibility - and by their unceasing calls for weaker drug laws - are endangering the health and even the lives of today’s young.

* * *

I don't normally think of Dame Joan Bakewell as an ally in my campaign to re-moralise Britain. I tend to feel she did her bit to de-moralise it in the Sixties. But I think she should be praised for pointing out what is missing in our country.

She said: ‘Religious commitment to charity and kindness has declined. Nobody learns that. They don’t learn it in their homes, they don’t learn it in their school, it’s seen as soft. It’s not what you’re about.

'You’re meant to stand up for your own individual personality, make your way in the world and good luck to you. Kindness, empathy, generosity are all in short supply and people used to learn it from the churches – I learnt it at Sunday school. Where do you learn it now? I don’t know.’

Nor do I.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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20 October 2011 5:25 PM

Once upon a time I really, really wanted to work for the Financial Times. I thought (as a left-wing Labour supporter, as I then was) that to work on the FT’s renowned Labour Staff would be the best possible opportunity to help the socialist cause. And I came quite close to getting aboard – I remember to this day my interview with the then editor, ‘Fredy’ Fisher (That’s not one of my typing errors. He spelt his Christian name like that, though his actual name was Max, and he had done an amazing thing , a Berlin-born, grammar-school educated German rising to edit a major British newspaper) , in his marvellous office in the handsome old FT headquarters, looking out on to a floodlit St Paul’s Cathedral. I thought I’d acquitted myself reasonably well but I didn’t, in the end, get the job.

Who knows what might have happened if I had? It’s often said that newspapers work on people just as much as people work on newspapers. On the FT I would have been surrounded by left-wing graduates like me. I certainly wouldn’t have had the extraordinary remedial education in reality I received at the hands of the old Daily Express, which, when I finally made it to Fleet Street to join it in January 1977, was a broadsheet with a daily sale of more than two million, run almost entirely by non-graduates, Fleet Street hard men (many of them Scottish) who had done their time in the provinces and often done gruelling stints in Manchester or Glasgow. Higher up the scale were real veterans of the many small wars of the end of Empire, from Suez to the Congo, men who had been reporters in the days when stories had to be sent by cable.

Why this digression? Well, this morning I went to an awards ceremony. The only real benefit of this was that , as it took place at breakfast time in London, I had to leave my provincial home before dawn and bicycle to the railway station by starlight, and was able to see the silhouette of Windsor Castle outlined against a blazing red sunrise from my Paddington-bound train. If they introduce Berlin Time, I suppose I’ll be able to do that almost every day in Winter, and it may grow stale. But once in a while is quite a treat.

I had been shortlisted, as I sometimes am, for an award I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get. But oddly enough, as the ceremony ground on, my hopes rose. Almost every single award went to someone from….the Financial Times (one of these was given by mistake, and had to be re-awarded to its real recipient) . Then a few went to an old left-wing trooper from the New Statesman, and to a selection of Cameroon (or even more leftist than that) figures from ‘The Times’, a paper which no longer has a single proper conservative writer, as far as I can recall. The organisers of the breakfast had been so keen that I should come that I began to wonder if in fact I was going to be the figleaf for the occasion, the one ‘right-wing’ recipient to prove that the whole business wasn’t just the Liberal Elite patting itself on the back.

But no. This rather silly hope was dashed. When the shortlist was read out, the compere made various weak jokes about how ‘right-wing’ I am (though he had the grace to mention one or two other things about me) and there were the usual patronising titters. The award went to some teenage Cameroon who went on and on about Gordon Brown’s trousers..

I might as well have stayed in bed, not least because I loathe such events at the best of times, being slightly more misanthropic than Mr Badger in ‘The Wind in the Willows’ , and shrivel with foreboding at the mention of the word ‘networking’.

One thing struck me about the occasion, apart from the complete failure to avoid bias, or the appearance of it. One was the relaxed and unembarrassed use, from the platform in front of a mixed audience, men and women, all ages, of four-letter words. Some of these were uttered by a prominent BBC reporter, himself a former Financial Times staffer. I am more and more convinced that the public use of such words (when not being used to get cheap and easy shock laughs, by ‘comedians’ and other public performers who can’t think of proper jokes) is a demonstration of power. Those who have to listen to them are being told they haven’t the power to object, those who are the direct objects of them are being personally humiliated.

Reflecting on yesterday’s posting, there’s something very pagan about this development. I did wonder, amid the rather splendid surroundings, what these people would have thought if the people who actually made the occasion work had followed their example. What if the pretty girls serving their breakfast had responded to a request for more coffee with “**** off and get it yourself, you ****”, or the cloakroom assistants had refused to find their coats afterwards, saying “why the **** do you think I should remember where your ****ing coat is, you ****”.

I’ll tell you how they would have reacted. They would have been righteously furious at being spoken to in that fashion. And it might have gone further than that.

And here’s what I would have said if I’d won the award for which I was shortlisted (the number of awards to FT staff had become a bit of a running gag by then)

‘You may not believe this, but I too once almost worked for the FT. Perhaps if I had I too would have learned to use four letter words in public and be wrong about almost every major issue in our recent history . But luckily for me I found my way to the less-respectable end of Fleet Street.’

Cannabis etcetera

A few quick responses to contributors.

‘Lenny’ comments: ‘I'm not sure what 'many silly members of the British liberal establishment' have to do with it, take a look at many discussions on cannabis in your 'Right Minds' section and I'll think you'll find an overwhelming majority are in favour of legalisation, left, right, liberal.’

Well, when major ‘conservative’ unpopular newspapers, influential among politicians, academics, lawyers, doctors, teachers, police chiefs etc., back cannabis decriminalisation (and I am thinking here very much of Sir Simon Jenkins , formerly editor of The Times, and of Frances Cairncross, formerly of the Economist, and the former Cabinet Ministers Peter Lilley and Robert Ainsworth, plus a very silly senior doctor whose name escapes me but who above all ought to know better) it is not surprising if general opinion shifts a bit. That is what silly members of the British liberal establishment have to do with it. And I think ‘silly’ is really rather mild. And I call them silly because they’re old enough to know better ; old enough to know that the ‘harm principle’ as set out by John Stuart Mill is not in fact a very good argument ; old enough to know that all crime is, in effect, caused by law – but that is not an argument for getting rid of law; and old enough to know that there is no ‘war on drugs’ in this country, as they absurdly continue to claim.

Mr Wooderson (does he actually come here to read, or only to write?) maintains a fiction: ‘since the Home Offices of successive governments have refused to even consider it.[by which I think he means legalisation of cannabis] They just continue spouting the same old circular justifications for the 'war on drugs'. Well, that’s for the gullible, Mr Wooderson, as I have so often said here, and I only wish he’d pay attention.

People and governments should be judged by their actions, not by their rhetoric. And this government and its predecessors have steadily reduced the penalties for drug possession to such a point that back in February 1994, John O’Connor, a former head of the Scotland Yard Flying Squad declared that cannabis had been decriminalised ‘for some time now’. Mr Wooderson will also have seen (but perhaps not observed) my many postings here about the ‘cannabis warning’ (the non-penalty which is the usual police response to this ex-crime) and my recent figures on the real state of the law for users of so-called ‘hard drugs’. The British government cannot actually legalise cannabis possession, because of its binding treaty commitments to have laws against it. It is however free to enforce those laws so feebly that they are (as they are) a dead letter.

Given the immense damage that their efforts have already done. You’ll have to search quite hard, these days, for any medium prepared to host- let alone make – the case against legalisation. That’s not because it doesn’t exist, just because , as in so many other areas, liberals and leftists have seized the commanding heights of media and culture, and are using their power to exclude contrary views. A majority is not an argument doesn’t decide a moral question, or even a practical question. There are plenty of examples in 20th and 21st century history of wicked people and bad ideas achieving majorities.

I’d stick to my view on this if I were the last man alive who held my opinion, because I believe my view to be morally and practically right.

Grant Higgins (who so far as I can tell wasn’t present in Salford on Tuesday) writes : ‘Hitchens lost the debate HAHAHAHAHA well done Peter Reynolds. I would wish you luck in the next debate Mr Hitchens but, let’s face it, cannabis should be legal.’

I’d only point out that to lose a vote (by six) isn’t necessarily to lose a debate. As I may have pointed out, the great majority of the audience declared themselves as users of cannabis at the beginning of the debate. I do remember some drug legalisers jeering on this site when this debate was first mentioned (and that was long, long ago, to those who complain that I didn’t advertise it) that Mr Reynolds would ‘slaughter’ me and that I would be foolish to engage with him, etc., etc. Well, I respect Mr Reynolds as a debater, but I don’t think it can be said that this took place.

Those who doubt me may turn to the generous and thoughtful comment from Sanj Chowdhary, who doesn’t agree with me, but has the grace and sense to disagree in a civilised fashion.

I’d repeat here the point I made to him during our pleasant and affable conversation, that I would be much more interested in the case for medical cannabis, if its advocates didn’t lend their support to campaigns to decriminalise cannabis as a recreational drug. As long as they do that, they are my opponents. The two issues are separate. If cannabis does have any medical applications they are quite unconnected to its use for self-intoxication. And there remains the unpredictable risk of irreversible mental illness, surely a worrying side-effect for any drug, however good its other results may be.

The tiresome ‘Haldane’ resurfaces, with another of his thought-free, unresponsive ‘makes you fink, dunnit’ postings. Just as Mr ‘Bunker’ never notices when he is himself debunked, Mr ‘Haldane’ repeatedly proclaims the virtues of thinking while not troubling to do so himself. It obviously doesn’t make *him* think, as in all his many contributions here, he has never shown any sign at all of noting or responding to anything I have said. Here he is: ‘A few days ago the government's advisers on drugs recommended that heroin use be decriminalised. This is the reconfigured committee that eighteen months ago saw seven of its members resign in protest at the sacking of Prof. David Nutt, who led his committee in recommending the declassification of cannabis. So we now have a new group of advisers recommending further relaxation of criminal penalties. To be consistent, I presume, Mr. Hitchens, that you would want all these experts dismissed - and so on - until we have a body made up of right minded people such as your good self and the former communist postman.’

Mr ‘Haldane’ and Mr Wooderson should obviously get in touch with each other. Here’s poor Mr Wooderson, convinced that the establishment is dead set against decriminalising drugs. And here’s Mr ‘Haldane’, triumphantly pointing out that the establishment has been completely suckered by the legalisation argument (more silly establishment liberals, whose qualifications in their scientific fields do not seem to have armoured them against groupthink conformism, false logic and irresponsibility). If Mr ‘Haldane’ is right( and he is), Mr Wooderson can’t be.

But, as I say, the fact that they all agree doesn’t make them right. I don’t know who this ex-communist postman is, to whom Mr ‘Haldane’ refers. But were I Home Secretary, I wouldn’t merely sack the lot of them. I’d repeal the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act which set them up, and reinstate the 1965 Dangerous Drugs Act, which a) didn’t give cannabis a special ‘soft’ status, b) punished possession as severely as trafficking and c) punished those who allowed their premises to be used for consumption of illegal drugs. . Whatever they’re expert in , it plainly isn’t the urgent task of preserving our civilisation.

Roy Robinson a) mistakes the Christian church *as an organisation* for the Christian ethic among ordinary people. All human organisations (as Christianity states) are controlled by fallen, sinful human beings; and b) he neglects to mention that the churches, Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, were severely persecuted by the German Nazis and the Soviet Communist states, can show many examples of courageous resistance to them, warned against their dangers ( see the encyclical ‘’Mit Brennende Sorge’ – can any other body in Germany show any more courageous and well-organised attempt to attack the Hitler regime once it was in power? , or indeed match the incredible courage of Cardinal Archbishop von Galen of Muenster in standing up to extermination policies and to the Gestapo? Many Christians also took appallingrisks across occupied Europe, by sheltering Jews from murder and persecution. The murder and the persecution were, by contrast, the settled and deliberate policies of a secular and anti-Christian government. The courage of that government’s opponents may often have failed, but I do wonder how Mr Robinson might have responded to the first whispered threat from the Gestapo, had he been in their power. The amazing thing is that anyone resisted at all. Among those who did, Christians are to be found in great numbers.

As for the Christian brothers etc., no doubt they are rightly open to much criticism, now I think accepted by their successors, and I do not defend or excuse them – but does Mr Robinson know or care about what happened in the orphanages of Soviet Russia, vigorously defended as a new civilisation by people such as him at the time? Or about the child-snatching policies of the East German state, likewise defended by anti-Christian bien-pensants until its fall. ? One need only look at the sycophantic rubbish still written about Castro’s Cuba by the modern western secular left to see that they are prepared to actively *defend* hell on earth while it is taking place, and to learn nothing from it. Nobody can say that the Christian churches have not learned from their mistakes.

Hitler loved his dogs. I can well believe it. But Hitler didn’t *personally* kill his victims. He found others to do that. I wonder if they were kind to animals?

Did I eat any of the Eid meat in Kashgar? No, I ate nothing more than an omelette and some toast all the time I was there, plus one very non-Islamic Chinese meal involving beef and noodles. Not sure why this matters.

‘Elaine’ inquires(first quoting me) : ‘ “In Chinese Turkestan but still (just) inhabited by Turkic Muslim Uighurs, it crossed my mind that a man who had slit a sheep’s throat would be bound to find it easier to do the same to a human, if it came to it). “‘If this deduction is based on the chosen method of animal slaughter then I wonder if the same deduction would be made of a Jew slaughtering a sheep following the kosher rules, since the two methods are almost identical.’

My answer to this is as follows. Perhaps it could. But here are a couple of points. There is, so far as I know, no modern Jewish equivalent of Eid, though the original Passover must have something like it, and Kosher slaughter is carried out by a minority of professional slaughtermen. I would however point out that in Kashgar at Eid (known locally as Korban) the slaughter of sheep is not done by professional slaughtermen, but in each home by the male members of the family (all of whom are taught how to do it).

She continues ‘If the deduction is based on the assumption that this method is particularly cruel, then I suggest more investigation be done because you would learn that studies actually indicate that this method actually causes less suffering to the animal. In fact that is the whole point.’

No, that is not my argument. I am dealing with the effect on the person, not the effect on the animal (though I am not wholly convinced by the claim that this form of slaughter is less distressing to the sheep. You’d have to ask some sheep). I’m no fan of modern slaughterhouses, but in Kashgar tethered sheep awaiting slaughter could clearly see, hear and smell the fate of their fellows before being killed, and some, especially the big rams purchased by the richer families, put up a fierce fight before dying.

'Elaine' continues : 'But if this deduction is based on the fact that some Muslim terrorists have slit the throats of other humans to terrorize other people, then I would hope you would not be so prejudicial.'

Elaine is extending what I said further than I said it, and then criticising me for what she thinks I might mean. I said what I said. No more, no less. It was based on direct experience and on observation. Whatever it may or may not be, it cannot be called prejudicial.

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19 October 2011 5:33 PM

I must admit to having been a bit rude, from time to time about Dame Joan Bakewell, the former Thinking Man’s Crumpet and more recently the official Voice of Older people. Dame Joan has now stood down from this official post (the Voice, I mean, not the Crumpet, which I think she was happy to relinquish many years before). It was her chirpy reminiscences of the relaxed days of the 1960s BBC, when the studios smelt of weed, that particularly annoyed me.

But today I must praise her. In far-too-little-noticed interview, after the most recent scandal over neglect of the old in hospitals, Dame Joan said the following very interesting thing: ‘I think….religious commitment to charity and kindness has declined. Nobody learns that. They don’t learn it in their homes, they don’t learn it in their school, it’s seen as soft. It’s not what you’re about. You’re meant to stand up for your own individual personality, make your way in the world and good luck to you. ‘Kindness, empathy, generosity, are all in short supply and people used to learn it from the churches, I learnt it at Sunday school. Where do you learn it now? I don’t know.’

No, nor do I. Interestingly enough, the great social commentator Gertrude Himmelfarb, whose work on Victorian virtues (The Demoralisation of Society) is so valuable, also credited Sunday Schools for much of the advance in civilisation which took place in our country during the 19th century.

This is of course slightly slipping round the real issue which is why there were Sunday schools, and what it was they taught. I look forward to a snappy intervention from Mr Embery here, but of course the thing they taught was Christianity. This was not Christianity as an anthropological curiosity, a series of curious rituals practised by our ancestors who had not been enlightened by Darwin, Huxley etc. It was Christianity as truth, a living religion, hot to the touch, capable of inspiring the good and scaring the bad.

Well, I may be mistaken here, but I haven’t seen anywhere that Dame Joan has embraced the faith. Please correct me if I am wrong here. But if she hasn’t, she (and Mr Embery and others) are left with the problem of what, if anything, can replace it if we wish to encourage kindness in a society increasingly devoted to self-worship and self-satisfaction.

Together with this, I’d like to mention the horrible story from China of the little girl. Yue Yue, run over twice in a hit-and-run accident in Foshan in southern Canton, and of the extreme reluctance of anyone present to do anything about it.

China, I very much fear, is the model for our own future. Its achievement of prosperity without liberty is grim news for those of us who hoped that prosperity would always be the reward for liberty, so encouraging people in the ways of freedom – which is ultimately based on self-restraint, itself founded on conscience, itself founded on faith.

I would add that what I have seen of the new Chinese prosperity has a horrible empty feel to it, all glitter and no heart, the promise of the advertising man which is always unfulfilled by reality. It is also deeply insecure, and set amid an unsettling vastness and anonymity. And it will be at a far lower level, in many ways, than the sort of prosperity achieved in this country and the USA in the second half of the 20th century.

My own recent experience suggests that in Britain such an incident would bring people running. But for how much longer will that be true, as the older Christianised generation fades away and the new feral go-getters become more common?

What was unimaginable twenty years ago is commonplace now, in so many ways. Why should this not also be true in the chillier, more competitive world which we are entering, via this economic crisis?

A small memory of China sticks in my mind, one which made me realise just how far I was from home one autumn Saturday afternoon in the rather lovely tree-shaded French Concession in Shanghai (it’s neither French nor a concession, but in the great thundering monster-city of Shanghai it is a refreshing refuge from the vertical modernity and endless rush. The picturesque, pleasing, intimate street was lined with market stalls. As I rambled among them, I saw a mouse. It wasn’t one of those worrying filthy, bedraggled mice you see scuttling among the rails in London Underground stations late at night. It was a clean, healthy-looking little rodent with large pink ears, doing nothing in particular. An English child reared on Beatrix Potter would have thought it sweet. One of the stallholders saw it as soon as I did. It was nowhere near his goods, whatever they were, and doing him no harm. Yet he ran urgently towards it and angrily stamped it to death, not stopping until well after he must have been sure it was.

I thought, and still think, that this small incident did have something to tell me about China as a whole. Unkindness to animals often prefigures unkindness to humans ( I confess that when I witnessed the mass slaughter of sheep for Eid in Kashgar, In Chinese Turkestan but still (just) inhabited by Turkic Muslim Uighurs, it crossed my mind that a man who had slit a sheep’s throat would be bound to find it easier to do the same to a human, if it came to it).

No, I’m not saying that all Chinese people are unkind and ruthless. That would be absurd and in any case I know it to be untrue from personal experience. And it’s easier to be kind and generous when you are yourself ( as many of us are) more comfortable and prosperous than most Chinese people have ever been, or ever will be. But I am saying that a society almost completely bereft of any force which argues for selflessness and kindness will be crueller in general than one which has such a force. And not just crueller. It will be indifferent, when it ought to care, as I think is exemplified in the hospitals where the old are neglected.

The Dope Debate

Regular readers here will be familiar with Mr Peter Reynolds, leader of the Cannabis Law Reform Society, who has tried to take me to the Press Complaints Commission for being rude about Marijuana, and has from time to time turned up at public meetings to heckle me.

Some months ago he challenged me to a debate on cannabis legalisation, and when I accepted, the excellent Salford University Debating Society swiftly stepped in to offer a venue for our titanic battle.

This took place on Tuesday evening, and – though I’ll leave it to those who were there (apparently a televised version will find its way on to the web) to give their own impressions, I would say in general that it was fair, courteous, thoughtful and educational for all involved, and that the audience was intelligently receptive to the arguments of both sides.

I lost the vote (as I usually do, though I did once win the vote on the same broad subject after a tremendously high-octane clash with Howard Marks, of which I fear there is no recording ) but rather more narrowly (the margin was six votes) than anyone had expected. All of which , I think, goes to show that the case for legalisation is not as clear cut as many silly members of the British liberal establishment think it is.